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Comment Why FTTC and not FTTH, anyway? (Score 2) 136

This seems to be as good a place as any to ask this: why are providers going with FTTC anyway, rather than FTTH (fibre-to-the-home)? These large cabinets are artifacts of FTTC -- at some point the fibre has to be broken out into bundles of dozens or hundreds of copper (coax or twisted-pair) drops that then need to be driven with enough power to push the signal for the last few hundred metres. Isn't this already a flawed approach? Moreover, this reduces the total bandwidth available between the local exchange carrier and the premises.

As I understand it, FTTC permits the provider to deliver high bandwidth services (at least by today's standards) at lower infrastructure costs then FTTH. However, this seems to be 'kicking the can down the road', to use the prosaic expression.

So, how much are the providers saving? For example, I've read it costs the National Grid on average 13 times more per mile to run 400 kV transmission lines underground as it does via pylons. Is there a similar figure that can be cited for the difference between FTTC and FTTH?

We seem to be living in a golden age of infrastructure underinvestment.

Comment Re:I would deploy a Domino cluster (Score 2) 333

I would deploy IBM Domino

A company I worked at a few years ago used Domino. I thought it was a great proof-of-concept for some future groupware product, but not ready for real-world use. It was broken in so many ways! I saved my list of Domino issues, which I've included below. This is for Domino version 7, so some of these issues may be fixed in subsequent versions. But to be this broken as recently as five years ago (and after 16 years of development, too!) is unforgivable.

So, check out my list of issues, and decide whether this is a product you would want to deploy in your organization!

Domino Issues:

- Slow.

- Spell checker with mailer is lame. Better to have MS Word-style
    spell checker.

- When using View -> Find in view, defaults in such a way that
    deletes all entries when the user thinks they are deleting a single
    entry. Virtually impossible to undo.

- When using View -> Find in view, can't delete individual e-mails.
    (see previous). Messages that are de-selected disappear from the view.

- Really crappy mailbox search algorithm

- Very weak mailbox filtering capability (compared with procmail)

- Hard to gauge where to wrap lines when using so-called
    `Internet-Style' messages. No automatic line wrap.

- When replying using `Internet-Style History', quotes sender
    in message envelope rather than sender in `From:' field.

- "Show source" on e-mail message does not show message envelope.

- Won't display HTML content of messages . . . good that it doesn't
    happen by default, but wish it were an option.

- View -> Show -> Source doesn't work for messages with no text in
    the message body, so no way to view headers of empty spam messages.

- Message size bears little relationship to actual content.

- Very slow over low-bandwidth connection. Much more overhead than
    IMAP.

- No multiple levels of undo -- can only undo last change

- When using find, it checkmarks all found messages. Then if you
    highlight one and attempt to delete it, it delete all checked messages
    *without prompting*. And no option to undo!

- When clicking on links in e-mail messages, unclear whether browser
    has been launched. Mouse cursor doesn't change, as it does with
    most other mail clients, unless you move it outside of the Notes window.

- Can't sort by date/title/etc in View -> Search this View in Tech Docs

- No Day of Week in Message. Month is numeric only.

- Mail Search is fucked. Try:
    "Author contains Sender/Organization AND outgoing".

- When opening mail attachments, no option to select which application
    to use.

- When opening mail attachments, cannot open an attachment with an
    unknown extension.

- Crashes when reporting certain messages to Symantec

- Cannot set different chimes for incoming mail. E.g. mail going to
    group folder due to mail rule makes same chime as mail going into
    mail inbox.

- Can't cut-and-paste into mail rules.

- No log to see when messages are deleted by mail rules.

- Can't respond to a message in a "meeting accepted" / "meeting
    declined" without cut-and-paste to a new memo.

- Copying a memo from a folder to a nested folder with the same name
    causes a duplicate of the memo to appear in the original folder.
    E.g. copy something from "Sent" to "Folders->Temp->Sent".

Cloud

Submission + - Build your own 135TB RAID6 storage pod for $7,384 (extremetech.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Backblaze, the cloud-based backup provider, has revealed how it continues to undercut its competitors: by building its own 135TB Storage Pods which cost just $7,384 in parts. Backblaze has provided almost all of the information that you need to make your own Storage Pod, including 45 3TB hard drives, three PCIe SATA II cards, and nine backplane multipliers, but without Backblaze's proprietary management software you'll probably have to use FreeNAS, or cobble together your own software solution.

Using Storage Pods, Backblaze says it can provide 1 petabyte of storage with rackspace, power, and bandwidth for three years, for just $95,000. Using Dell hardware it would cost $500,000 — and using Amazon S3, 1PB costs $2.5 million.

(A couple of years ago they showed how to make their first-generation, 67TB Storage Pods: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/09/02/138209/Build-Your-Own-28M-Petabyte-Disk-Array-For-117k)

Media

Submission + - Reddit Co-Founder accused of Hacking MIT Computers (webmarketingwar.com)

An anonymous reader writes: New York Times has reported that Reddit co founder Aaron Swartz has been indicted for stealing more than 4 million documents from the highly prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) .
AMD

Submission + - What to expect in OpenBSD 5.0 onwards (blogspot.com)

badger.foo writes: "OpenBSD-current just turned 5.0-beta, providing us a preview of what the upcoming release (slated for November 1st) will look like. Book of PF author Peter Hansteen takes us through the main new features and explains the development process that has consistently turned out high-quality releases on time, every six months for more than a decade."
Science

Submission + - Can Science Survive the Coming Age of Austerity?

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Alexis Madrigal writes that everyone agrees you need science and technology R&D, but when budgets get tight, research into quantum dots or the fundamental forces that cause earthquakes has a hard time holding the line against health care or tax cuts for the richest Americans. Different countries are taking different approaches. Japan is focusing on its most elite researchers, giving up to $50 million to 30 different people. Other countries are just giving up on some areas of research to focus on others; for example, take US particle physicists, who will spend their careers trying to drive from the backseat as our European counterparts run the Large Hadron Collider. A third approach might be to reduce redundancies in research. "An idea to provide funding in a larger number of key areas that would avoid duplication is to create dedicated research centers where several investigators can work in parallel on complementary topics," writes Joerg Heber. "If we do less research we need to do it right. And using this crisis to think about our research infrastructure needn’t be a bad thing. It should be seen as an opportunity to reform the academic research system in a more comprehensive and fundamental way than the academic community and the politicians normally dare to think about.""

Comment Re: Not really new from him. (Score 1) 347

I remember this. Quote from that programme:

"Prof MICHIO KAKU (City University of New York): The end of Moore's Law is perhaps the single greatest economic threat to modern society, and unless we deal with it we could be facing economic ruin."

Really?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2004/hendrikshontrans.shtml

Comment Re:ICANN is open? (Score 1) 27

ICANN has a history of antipathy toward public participation.

Kieren McCarthy, who has alternately been a journalist covering ICANN and also worked as ICANN's , general manager of public participation, has very good commentary on ICANNs merits (there are a few) and foibles (there are many):

http://kierenmccarthy.com/category/internet-governance/icann/

Transportation

Heroic Engineer Crashes Own Vehicle To Save a Life 486

scottbomb sends in this feel-good story of an engineer-hero, calling it "one of the coolest stories I've read in a long time." "A manager of Boeing's F22 fighter-jet program, Innes dodged the truck, then looked back to see that the driver was slumped over the wheel. He knew a busy intersection was just ahead, and he had to act fast. Without consulting the passengers in his minivan — 'there was no time to take a vote' — Innes kicked into engineer mode. 'Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together,' Innes explained."
United Kingdom

Badgers Digging Up Ancient Human Remains 172

One of England's oldest graveyards is under siege by badgers. Rev Simon Shouler now regularly patrols the grounds of St. Remigius Church looking for bones that the badgers have dug up. The badger is a protected species in England so they can not be killed, and attempts to have them relocated have been blocked by English Nature. From the article: "At least four graves have been disturbed so far; in one instance a child found a leg bone and took it home to his parents. ... Rev. Simon Shouler has been forced to carry out regular patrols to pick up stray bones, store them and re-inter them all in a new grave."
The Military

Russian Army Upgrades Its Inflatable Weapons 197

jamax writes "According to the BBC: 'The Russian military has come up with an inventive way to deceive the enemy and save money at the same time: inflatable weapons. They look just like real ones: they are easy to transport and quick to deploy. You name it, the Russian army is blowing it up: from pretend tanks to entire radar stations.' But the interesting thing is these decoys are not dumb - actually they appear to be highly advanced for what I thought was a WWII-grade aerial photography countermeasures. Apparently they have heat signatures comparable with the military tech they represent, as well as the same radar signature."
News

Ray Kurzweil Responds To PZ Myers 238

On Tuesday we discussed a scathing critique of Ray Kurzweil's understanding of the brain written by PZ Myers. Reader Amara notes that Kurzweil has now responded on his blog. Quoting: "Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn't at my talk), [claims] that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain."

Comment Re:learn python (Score 1) 565

While learning Python isn't the only reasonable option, it's way up there. It has several key advantages:

1. Object oriented

This is one of the key paradigm shifts since you were coding, and Python embodies the principle more cleanly than Perl or C++ . In fact, learning Python will probably make it easier to understand C++, Objective C and Java, which are arguably more awkward embodiments of OO.

2. Interpreted

The rise in interpreted languages is another major development since the 80s. It also helps speed the edit-test-debug cycle, making it faster to learn.

3. Popular

Python is one of the top 10 most popular languages at the moment: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html. It's pretty much eclipsed Perl, which has been on the wane for a while. Interest in Ruby (the other "hot" interpreted language) also seems to be flagging.

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